This is going to be a very brief update with no photos – this month is nuts, and I’m giving myself about ten minutes to jot down a few thoughts before I move onto the next thing.
It feels like there are dozens of moving parts at the moment – but a big one is the looming window order. You might remember that big order – all the way back in April! The lead time on the windows went from 4 weeks in March 2020 to 28!!! weeks in April 2022. We haven’t really heard any updates on them, but we’re expecting that in the next 4-6 weeks they will be ready – and we are not.
Getting subs rolling again has been a challenge. The biggest hurdle so far has been getting a mason going. We finally made some headway about a week and a half ago, and we are slated to have a bricklayer starting the last week of October / first week of November. It’s a big job – opening up and rebuilding the back wall for two huge openings with 8 windows total – plus quite a bit of work on the exterior wall about to become an interior wall in the kitchen and pantry.
The other big part of this work is that we’re closing up the exterior access to the basement…which means we’ve got to have INDOOR access to the basement really soon. That’s a huge framing undertaking – and October is well underway.
Other things directly related to the masonry work:
- Getting items away from the south and east walls – in both the kitchen and the studio upstairs.
- Getting the utilities buried – and if that can’t happen in time – getting the power lines temporarily covered for safety. (I’ve ordered the covers from Ameren, and those should be installed in 7-10 days.) Waiting on an Ameren engineer to call me back about the underground utilities. The issue we have is that we were going to install the new box on the garage – but we’re not sure where we mount it temporarily until the garage is done in the next phase.
- Removing all the exterior electrical devices off the walls so they can be patched by the mason.
- Reviewing steel lintel sizes with our structural engineer. (Done.)
- Ordering herringbone flooring samples to do a mock up with the proposed subfloor. And samples have changed since 2020, so we need new samples first, then the order of the mockup supply. Why the flooring mockup is important to the floor framing / masonry work is more complicated to explain than I have the energy for tonight. I’ll circle back later.
Other things we’ve been doing since my last post:
- Received the floor model Sub-Zero unit into a temporary storage location in my office building.
- Plumbing items are all in, but Kohler will hold in their warehouse for awhile.
- Contacted our building inspector to notify him of upcoming masonry work starting.
- Contacted our mechanical inspector to ask a few questions about the kitchen exhaust so that we can finalize our vent hood and range order. He’s requiring us to get a notarized letter from our neighbor that we can exhaust on the west side of our house (which is actually our property line), Neighbor has agreed, but I need to get that rolling.
- I’m trying to find alternative options for hauling away building materials in the backyard that don’t involve a street dumpster and rolling a wheelbarrow through the front garden a zillion times. I wanted to so one of those haul away bag services, but all the above ground utilities in the alley prohibit it.
- Taking magnolia cuttings before the first frost. Setting up a cutting station somewhere in the house that’s about to feel REALLY cramped and full of construction stuff.
- We replaced our 23 year old mattress (finally) and need to get a queen size mattress and box spring out of the house.
- And our new light arrived broken – but only slightly broken, so we didn’t notice it until we spent 1.5 hours installing it. Replacement shipped today.
- Bought a dishwasher with no lead time estimate. Still washing dishes by hand. About to be washing them in the bathroom sink.
- Fall planted bulbs shipping on October 18th, so those will need to go into the ground this month too.
- We switched up the dishwasher location and added a second sink to the kitchen layout, so I also need to redesign the cabinets, and get the drawings to the cabinet maker.
- Unrelated, but also related: F has high school applications starting this month, plus open houses and shadow days, essays and recommendation letters. She’s also in Elf, the Musical in December, so lots of practices between now and then. And I really need to start my holiday cards – but where the heck am I going to work on them? And we make 98% of our meals at home – how are we going to handle no kitchen????
OK, time’s up. More soon, with photos. Promise.